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This seems sad, but inevitable. At the very least, it seems clear that Hauser has been cutting corners for a long time, and finally crashed.

Harvard’s correct response stands notably in contrast with the foot-dragging of GMU in the Wegman case, where no ruling has emerged after more than a year, even though there is ample evidence of plagiarism and worse.

“Harvard’s correct response stands notably in contrast with the foot-dragging of GMU in the Wegman case, where no ruling has emerged after more than a year, even though there is ample evidence of plagiarism and worse.”

“Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith publicly confirmed for the first time in a letter to the Faculty that a committee had found psychology professor Marc D. Hauser “solely responsible” for eight instances of scientific misconduct in his laboratory.

“After careful review of the investigating committee’s confidential report and opportunities for Professor Hauser to respond, I accepted the committee’s findings and immediately moved to fulfill our obligations to the funding agencies and scientific community and to impose appropriate sanctions,” Smith wrote.

Hauser, the author of “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong” whose research focuses on the cognitive function of primates, came under public scrutiny last week after a three-year internal investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct.”

Harvard takes four years and this reflects badly on GMU for having taken a year so far?

Cian and Barry, if you’re lumping Hauser in with Evolutionary Psychologists like Buss, Tooby, Cosmides, and Pinker, you’re making a big mistake. Hauser, who’s early work was interesting and sound (I think this probably doomed him, as he developed a reputation that was very difficult to live up to), is an evolutionary psychologist in a much broader sense than Buss, et al. The latter group is all about the EEA and stone age minds, with poorly done survey research, experiments with no bearing on their research questions, etc. Hauser’s sort does traditional comparative research, draws precisely the sorts of conclusions that comparative psychology has been drawing since well befor any of our grandparents were born, and calls itself, occasionally, “evolutionary psychology” largely, I think, to rescue evolution in psychology from the fools who have been trying to co-opt it for the last 20+ years.

I notice that one of Hauser’s opponents, and the main person willing to talk to the Crimson, was Gordon Gallup:

“Ultimately it’s not a question of whether he can replicate his findings—it’s whether other people can,” said Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a psychology professor at University at Albany, State University of New York who has publicly questioned Hauser’s body of research.